Sudeten German Party Complaint to the League of Nations and the Situation of the German Minority in Czechoslovakia

Abstract

The ethnic problem had never before been such a pressing issue at the international level as it was in the initial post-war years, in particular, in the areas of Central and Southeast Europe. Based on post-war negotiations, the idea of international protection of national minorities was born, which was closely connected with the system of peace treaties concluded with defeated states. The submitted study uses unpublished sources of Czechoslovak (National Archives in Prague, Archives of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Prague) and British (National Archives in Kew) provenance, published sources and specialist publications to look at the complaints of national minorities to the League of Nations during the 1930s; specifically — at the petition of the Sudeten German Party in Czechoslovakia in 1936, which concerned an instruction from the Ministry of National Defence to companies intending to apply for state contracts about the ethnic composition of their employees. It uses this example to demonstrate the instrumental nature of Sudeten German Party policy, showing that it did not represent a real attempt at improving the living conditions for the German minority in the First Czechoslovak Republic but rather was a deliberate effort to increase the visibility of the political entity and to internationalize the issue of the cohabitation of Czechs and Germans in interwar Czechoslovakia. The study also demonstrates that another objective of the Sudeten German Party was to attract attention from Great Britain, which had been avoiding significant engagement in Central Europe.